[OSM-legal-talk] License question, user clicking on map

Jonathan Harley jon at spiffymap.net
Mon Mar 4 12:39:09 UTC 2013


On 04/03/13 11:53, Pieren wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Jonathan Harley <jon at spiffymap.net> wrote:
>
>> Personally, I think this does leave a loophole where you could reverse
>> engineer OSM's data from imagery, but as I said at the time, I'm not worried
>> about it because so much accuracy would be lost. In any case,
> Technically, it is possible to export in a format where accuracy is
> 100% preserved, e.g. any vectorized format like PDF or SVG. If you
> export all tags in a concatenated text string, your map is maybe not
> readable for humans but you could in this way rebuild the full
> database under a new license...

That was touched on last time round, yes. Giving someone a vector-format 
image might count as conveying a database. I think it's ambiguous.

The ODbL essentially treats images and databases as though one thing can 
never be both. It's another thing that could usefully be clarified in a 
future version, IMO.

J.


-- 
Dr Jonathan Harley   :    Managing Director    :   SpiffyMap Ltd

md at spiffymap.com      Phone: 0845 313 8457     www.spiffymap.com
The Venture Centre, Sir William Lyons Road, Coventry CV4 7EZ, UK




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